Photo Booth Pics Are Up

Click HERE to relive all of the good-natured debauchery that was the second annual Guilty Pleasures Party. (Oh, and sorry I show up in so many of the pics, I got a little camera happy.)

- Kim Nowacki

Guilty Pleasures Party 2: What A Night!

THANK YOU to everyone who turned out for the second annual Guilty Pleasures Party this past Friday at the Yakima Sports Center. I don’t know about you, but I’m still recovering.

It was great to see all your deep, dark guilty pleasures, which you can view at On’s FLICKR page. We’ll also have Read more

Blayne Makes It Through Another Round on ‘Project Runway’

Blayne-licious is still in.

Yakima native Blayne Walsh avoided the dreaded “auf Wiedersehen” for a second week on the reality show “Project Runway,” which launched its fifth season July 16.

In the drama-fueled competition, aspiring fashion designers take on weekly challenges and vie for the opportunity to show their own line at New York Fashion Week. The show is hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum.

This week’s challenge Read more

West Valley’s Erin Ecklund Makes Big Screen Debut

Erin Ecklund, a 2002 West Valley High School graduate, recently made her big-screen debut as Sophie in “The Unidentified,” an independent film which had its world premiere the end of this past May at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. The film’s director, Kevan Tucker, won Best New Director at the festival.

You can watch the trailer for the film, here.

Active in drama through her high school and the Warehouse Theatre Company (she was Peter Pan in 2002 at the WTC), Ecklund graduated in 2006 from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in drama from The Experimental Theatre Wing.

“It’d be nice to be recognized as a character in a good story,” Ecklund, then 18, said during a 2002 interview with the Yakima Herald-Republic. “Ten years from now, I’d like to be on Broadway, or in movies and things.”

Warhol Portrait Show At Maryhill Museum of Art

“It was his spontaneous intuition that not to be received as an image in the common consciousness is to be bereft of the only reality that matters. This thought may be enlisted to explain his propensity to repeat, over and over, the same image of the same personality — Marilyn, Liz, Jackie, Elvis — as if the quantity of iterated images increased the substance, in the only way possible, of those who had become labels for themselves.”

— Art critic Arthur Danto

BY KIM NOWACKI
Yakima Herald-Republic

GOLDENDALE — Andy Warhol was a great manipulator of images, including his own.
He was an artist — one of the most important and influential of the 20th century — more interested in labels than the contents.

He approached household products like celebrities, and vice versa.

“He was not interested in, say, Norma Jeane Baker and her struggles,” says Sue Taylor, a noted art critic, professor of art history at Portland State University and corresponding editor for Art in America magazine.

Instead, Warhol’s focus was solely on Baker’s glamorized, Hollywood-created persona of Marilyn Monroe.

In her cult of celebrity.

In her marketed image.

And in mass-producing that iconic image, Warhol commented on our consumption of it.

He was also “the great leveler who reduced all subjects, no matter what their measure of importance, to the same degree of interpretation,” states the brochure for “Andy Warhol and Other Famous Faces,” an exhibition of portraits that opens Saturday at the Maryhill Museum of Art, just south of Goldendale. It will be on display through Nov. 15.

The show features a number of Warhol’s famous pop art portraits from the ’60s and ’70s — Marilyn, the Beatles, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sitting Bull, General Custer, Geronimo, Queen Elizabeth II, Jimmy Carter, Liza Minnelli — as well as portraits by a number of artists inspired by Warhol’s work. They include Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1970 screen print “Signs” and Red Grooms’ 1987 lithograph “Elvis,” both of which not only depict people, but also certain eras in American history.

All of the work in the exhibit is on loan from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation. This is the third exhibition of works loaned by Schnitzer that Maryhill has organized.

“For a long time, I’ve wanted to do an Andy Warhol portrait show,” explains Maryhill curator Lee Musgrave.

“I always felt Andy revolutionized portraits,” Musgrave says while taking a break from hanging the neon-colored collection in an upstairs showroom.

However, it was Schnitzer — he will give a talk at Maryhill on Aug. 2 — who encouraged Musgrave to also include artists influenced by Warhol.

Unlike regal, realistic one-of-a-kind portraits, Warhol took ready-made images from magazines and newspapers, and through the mass-media tool of printmaking, blurred the lines of high and low art.

He made art out of mass-produced items and images — and then sought to also mass produce the art.

“When artists struggled to be authentic and original, he did the opposite,” says Portland State’s Taylor.

Next Thursday, Taylor will present his lecture, “Andy Warhol, Postmodern Persona,” which highlights Warhol, who died in 1987, and his impact on art and pop culture.

An American icon himself known for his distinctive mannerisms and hip New York studio dubbed “The Factory,” Warhol and his prints are still recognized even by people who don’t follow art or recite his, well, famous “15 minutes” quote.

But to see his work in person is to see its richness and scale, to see beyond its glossy mass-produced persona.

“You’re struck by that this was made by hand,” says Musgrave.

At the Maryhill show, you can get up close and study the glitter lining in Queen Elizabeth II — the prints of her are two of the most striking in the exhibit — or Warhol’s smudged fingerprint underneath the Beatles.

And, yes, there’s even the emblematic “Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato)” — perhaps a de facto portrait of the artist.

“It’s easy to chuckle when you see those Campbell’s soup cans,” says Taylor. “But there’s a great deal of substance there.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Andy Warhol and Other Famous Faces” opens July 19 at the Maryhill Museum of Art.

WHEN: Maryhill is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through Nov. 15.

WHERE: Overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, the museum is off State Route 14, just west of U.S. Highway 97 near Goldendale.

HOW MUCH: Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for seniors, $2 for ages 6-16 and free for ages 5 and under.

INFO: Call 773-3733, or visit www.maryhillmuseum.org.

MORE WARHOL: Here are upcoming events related to the “Andy Warhol and Other Famous Faces” exhibition:

* 1-4 p.m. July 19 and Aug. 2 — Visitors can join the museum’s education staff to create a free self-portrait using Warhol’s “blotted line technique.”

* 7 p.m. July 24 — Art critic Sue Taylor will present the lecture “Andy Warhol, Postmodern Persona,” which highlights Warhol and his impact on art and pop culture. Free with museum admission.

* 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Aug. 2 — Noted master printer Frank Janzen will lead a mono-print workshop for those with a serious interest in printmaking. Cost is $60 and advance registration is required.

* 3 p.m. Aug. 2 — A talk by art collector Jordan Schnitzer. All of the work in the Warhol exhibit is on loan from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation. Schnitzer began collecting art at age 14 and has a contemporary print collection of more than 5,000 works. The talk will be followed by a walk through the exhibit led by Maryhill curator Lee Musgrave. Free with museum admission.

ABOUT MARYHILL: The castlelike museum was founded by Northwest entrepreneur Sam Hill and opened to the public in 1940. It’s home to early 20th century European works, Native American artifacts, a captivating chess set collection, stunning Rodin sculptures — the second largest collection on the West Coast — and a number of beautiful, yet a little feisty, peacocks wandering the grounds. (See if you can spot Frederick, the all-white peacock.) Four miles east of Maryhill is the museum’s full-scale replica of England’s famous Neolithic Stonehenge.

AT STONEHENGE: At 7 p.m. July 19, Keith Scales, artistic director for the Classic Greek Theatre of Oregon in Portland, will present the work of 19th century Irish poet W.B. Yeats at the Stonehenge Memorial. The free program will feature two short plays by Yeats titled “The Cat and the Moon” and “At the Hawks Well.”

Blayne Makes It Through (barely) the First Episode of “Project Runway”

Well, West Valley’s Blayne Walsh ended up in the bottom three last night on “Project Runway.” Not a great way to kick off the show, but at least he’s still there.

And really, his design wasn’t that bad, although Heidi Klum did call it “playboy bunny gone grunge” and it was compared to a diaper.

Next week he can only do better — I hope.

The bronze Blayne — a 2003 West Valley High School grad who slings coffee in Seattle and who is addicted to tanning — is one of 16 contestants (now 15) on the fifth season of “Project Runway.”

Don’t Forget …

To watch homeboy Blayne Walsh (2003 West Valley High School grad) tonight on “Project Runway.” It starts at 9 p.m. on the Bravo channel.

Yay for neon!

UPDATE: Yakima Native On Upcoming Season of ‘Project Runway’

Super-fab Yakima native Blayne Walsh, 23, is among the fashionistas trying to make the cut and earn the title of top designer in season five of the Bravo channel’s “Project Runway.”

Walsh, a 2003 West Valley High School graduate (full name: Richard Blayne Walsh), just returned home to Seattle after shooting the popular reality show in New York.

The new season begins at 9 p.m. this Wednesday on Bravo. (Viewing party at the West Valley Tavern anyone?)
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